Here, he's a goddamn pantomime villain who kisses a woman to death and also teleports (?) (that may just have been shit editing again) and generally couldn't be more of a heel if he tried. Tagawa's Heihachi was a strict and unlikable man, but with a sense of honour and decency he built Tekken City not intending to force the rest of the country to live like hobos but to protect the minority he felt was most necessary to rebuild the world. And yet we see archive footage from Tekken 2010 during K's flashes of old memories, including the Jackhammers, and if so, where the hell did all this stuff go? Is that all happening in the West Anvil and we're stuck in the East?īonus bad: what the hell happened to Heihachi and Bryan Fury? I can understand and begrudgingly accept both lacking their signature visual styles (you can just about justify it by the time-gap between this and Tekken 2010) but they're completely different characters. Not to mention that all the civilians, while visibly impoverished, seem to be getting along with their lives just fine (K's neighbour is taking medical classes!) without the constant threat of masked stormtroopers showing up to drag people off into the night and open up with automatic weapons in public. And no, before you ask, at no point do we visibly move inside the walls of Tekken City (which doesn't really exist except as a dodgy CG backdrop) so this is all definitely supposed to be the slums. There's that high-rise flat he wakes up in, a fairly modern nightclub, and apparently some sort of science lab with hologram screens (which admittedly was filmed using a barely disguised abandoned council building but still), none of which would have existed in 'the Anvil' we were introduced to before - a place where TVs were so scarce that people would stand around in the street craning their necks at big TitanTron screens up high, and where even the friendly bars look like a bomb made of random car parts exploded inside them. 'K' may be in a slum town but.well, he's not, really. Sure, it's a prequel, of course the world will be a little different, but here it's so different it's unrecognizable. The whole whopping 3 characters from the games aside, there's little attempt to link what's happening here to any event from any point in the games' story or, more critically, the events of the previous film. The Bad: This script absolutely started life as a completely-unrelated-to-Tekken movie. And Cary Tagawa really could've phoned this one in, but apparently his pride wouldn't let him as he gives his best lip-curling sneer and throaty-gargle villain voice in his relatively sparse appearance. The Minister's tag-along henchwomen/arm candy, played by Charlotte Kirk and Biljana Misic, don't have any sort of character development and barely any dialogue but they're shockingly personable, especially Kirk, with her bratty laughing, skipping and sadistic applause. Both Wenham (as Rhona) and Paige Lindquist (as a more generic love interest) are not exactly great actors but they're trying to wring some emotion out of what they're given and.kinda succeed. Serbedzija is plainly having a whale of a time as the Minister, hamming it up marvellously - and with a villain whose schtick is as dumb as 'trains assassins and uses religious vocabulary and conventions for no apparent reason' ham is the best route to take. Firstly, at least some of the cast seem enthusiastic about what they're doing. Okay, if I look hard enough, I can find good in anything.
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